The terms and conditions provide greater certainty for project developers preparing to participate in the auction, trade body Solar Ireland said in a post last week.
July 27, 2026
The government of the Republic of Ireland has published the terms for its annual Renewable Electricity Support Scheme (RESS 6) auction, introducing, for the first time, separate onshore wind and solar pots and using non-price, EU Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA) criteria.
The terms and conditions provide greater certainty for project developers preparing to participate in the auction, trade body Solar Ireland said in a post last week. The government published the terms and conditions of the auction the week prior, on 16 July.
The qualification window runs from (all 2026 dates) 30 July to 27 August, with final qualification decisions on 21 October, followed by the auction submission window from 29 October to 5 November. The provisional auction results are announced on 18 November, followed by the final results on 2 December. The notices of award are on 10 December.
The exact quantity being targeted will be released closer to the auction time. It is being run by transmission system operator Eirgrid.
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It is the first RESS auction to include separate technology pots for onshore solar and wind. In previous years, it was one pot, though each technology had its own strike price.
Last year’s auction saw 218.84MW of onshore wind and 860.38MW of solar PV procured, totalling 1.08GW spread across 23 projects.
It is also the first RESS auction to incorporate the non-price criteria requirements under the Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA). The NZIA is an EU law that aims to boost clean energy deployments as well as upstream manufacturing, passed in 2024 (covered by our sister site PV Tech at the time).
Within each pot, projects will be scored on 85% price, 5% resilience and 10% energy system integration.
The energy system integration score allocates up to 2.5% for incorporating a secondary technology and 7.5% for incorporating battery storage. As more and more renewables come online, projects that can provide dispatchability and flexibility with storage become more valuable.
However, Solar Ireland said that important regulatory and market barriers remain.
‘Current rules continue to limit the efficient deployment of hybrid and co-located projects, meaning developers are being incentivised through RESS to deliver capabilities that the wider regulatory framework does not yet fully support’, the trade body said.
Meanwhile, the Solar Capacity Factor and Unrealised Available Energy Compensation provisions have remained unchanged from previous auctions.
The Solar Capacity Factor of 11% is an assumption of how much power solar PV will actually generate relative to its theoretical maximum. The Unrealised Available Energy Compensation, meanwhile, is a financial mechanism that compensates generators for physical availability that cannot be supplied due to grid, curtailment, or other system issues beyond their control.
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See all the details about RESS 6 on the Irish government’s website here.
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Cameron Murray
Senior Reporter, Informa
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